While eating healthy might not be the first thing on your mind when evacuating or buckling down at home when a hurricane is on its way, maybe it should be.

Whether you plan to wait it out or get out of town, hurricane season, which officially began Tuesday, provides plenty of stress that need to be dealt with.

“Eating healthy during the hurricanes helps for two reasons: One, it helps your mood and it helps you maintain energy,” Kelli Worley, registered dietician with Nutrition Solutions in Beaumont, said. “If you’re used to eating healthy and then don’t, it will make you feel sluggish.”

Although hurricanes might seem like the perfect excuse for indulging in forbidden cheese puffs, sugary snacks and canned meat, nutritionists said that’s not a good idea.

“In a stressful situation, you kind of crave foods that make you feel good, like sweets, but that will make you crash,” said Korey Read, a fitness specialist at Christus Health and Wellness Center who also has a degree in nutrition.

While that might make you sad, the good news is that Worley recommends eating more often.

“If you eat something every few hours and combine carbohydrates with protein, it will digest slower and keep your blood sugar stable,” she said. “I do think about what foods will help us when we’re under stress.”

Read pointed out that in a hurricane situation, doctors probably won’t be as accessible, and medicine could be hard to track down as well, making healthy food choices more important.

“Just read a little bit more into what you’re eating,” he said. “It’s an easy fix.”

Regardless of your food choices, the National

Hurricane Center recommends you stock enough food for your family to last three to seven days.

Read’s and Worley’s suggestions for stocking your hurricane kit include some standard favorites as well as a few more unusual items.

Protein: Tuna and peanut butter or other nut butters, standards in many hurricane kits, are good, nutritionally dense foods, Read said. Worley added that jerkey is a good choice. “It’s high in salt, but it’s better than Vienna sausages,” she said.

Grains: Whole wheat crackers — not the kind with filling — and old-fashioned oats. While the crackers are self-explanatory, Read suggests that even without cooking them, oats can be eaten combined with peanut butter, like certain kinds of no-bake cookies. And, of course, if you do have a hot water source, they cook up nicely.

Dairy: Skim milk powder combines with water to make milk. “Dairy is usually lacking in hurricane kits,” Read said, making this a good choice. You can add it to that cooked oatmeal as well.

Fruit: No sugar added applesauce and dried fruits keep a long time and are naturally sweet. Read advises watching out for the types that have added sugar though. “Especially with dried fruit, be careful. They do often add sugar, especially with dried pineapple,” he said.

Vegetables: Low sodium V-8 juice and low or no sodium canned vegetables. Again, the added sodium is something your body just doesn’t need, Read said, and it can add up quickly with canned foods.

Snacks: Instead of buying trail mix, just make your own with mixed nuts, raisins and other dried fruit, Worley and Read said. “The pre-made trail mixes are usually loaded with more M&M’s and sugar than fruit and nuts,” Read said.

Worley added to make sure the food you pack is varied.

“Don’t only have one type of food, like only snack foods or only canned meat,” she said. “Try to have a variety and try not to pack only things high in sugar or carbohydrates. That’s not going to leave you satisfied.”

Read emphasized checking the added ingredients like sodium and sugar.

“Read the nutrition labels. If you can’t pronounce it, it’s probably not something you want in your body,” he said.

On the other hand, a small bag of cheese puffs or a can of canned meat isn’t going to ruin your health.

“I do keep a box of cookies, like ginger snaps or vanilla wafers, ones that keep longer, in my kit,” Worley admitted.